The Greenhouse in March

 

  

              In Late March, the greenhouse comes into its own. For months, it’s been quiet—chilly and damp, holding the yard’s plants that cannot tolerate frost or freezing as well as the succulent collection that survives without water for the winter. All of the pots line the high shelves. The grow lights are strung up out of the way from the summer house plants, even though they have long moved back to my classroom. The volunteer spider plant crouches between two pavers, but does not grow. No one goes in or out. The door sticks.

                But March is a busy month in this space. The plant shelf is full to overflowing with starts; the first round grows, is bumped up into four inch pots, and moves out just in time for the tomatoes and summer crops to move onto the heating pads.  Extra starts are tucked in on wire shelves under the windows until they find homes. The lights are lowered and set on timers which I shift as the days grow longer. Last week, the succulents started to bloom so I watered them all and topped them off with compost (a few need homes if you are interested…) I started to root a few scented geraniums as well.  Plants are everywhere.

 

               But, the plants are not the only living things using this space now. The cats have both discovered it. One likes the high shelf over the door—the warmest spot—while the other sprawls on the bricks or the bumpy burlap sack that covers the potting soil. They hunt bugs in the corners. It is warm and light but protected from the wind. If we are home for lunch, we carry the tray out and set it on the planting shelf.  In the late afternoon, Mark and I like to read in the space, cat on lap. The desk is a good place to write—sometimes the internet reaches, sometimes not. It’s ok either way.

                The greenhouse also becomes the space to dry sweaters that need to be washed after a long winter. Bread dough rises better out there. It’s a holding spot for hand tools from the garden. Next week, the garden goddesses in their newly painted finery will survey the yard through the milky windows waiting for assured dry weather to be tucked among the plants for the summer. Soon, we will set up the shower with towels, shampoo, and cucumber scented soap and we will slip outside in the moonlight to bathe.

Early Spring Days

 

 

            It ws a beautiful day yesterday—warm and sunny and dry. Rare in western Oregon in late winter. We did the laundry early, hung it all up outside to dry, and walked up to the Farmer’s Market. By the time we got home, we were both humming Greg Brown’s song:

Love calls like the wild birds-
It's another day
A Spring wind blew my list of
Things to do...away

            “I don’t want to clean the kitchen, even though it is a mess,” I told Mark, who did not want to attack the bathroom, either. So we called it a truce for the house and wandered out into the back yard. There was compost to cut up, beds to toss over to help work the leaves and chicken straw into the soil, trimming to do, and cats to chase around. Mark brought us lunch and tea to the sitting area by the arch covered with honeysuckle, and one cat basked in the hooped bed, warm and dry, while we ate and read for a bit. After lunch, we went to the local nursery, bought a columnar apple, and planted it between two raised beds, bringing the number of fruit trees in the yard up to ten.

             It is that time of year where several hours in the yard does not more the dial very far on tidying up. I will come in, look out the back window and wonder “What did I just do?”  So, as I worked, I reminded myself—this is not a garden, full of flowers in matching pots and cute little signs, with perfectly mulched paths where bantam chickens wander and never eat the kale. It’s really a small farm, a homestead, raising food for the household, populated by people, cats, a rabbit, chickens, and, yes, slugs and aphids. Jays claim their space loudly. Squirrels dig up nuts they hid in October and taunt the cats. We’ve had possums for years, although there are none right now, sadly. It is a workshop, a studio, a living room, a meditation space, and a retreat from the world. It is far from perfect. But, on a sunny day in March, it is our home.